Maybe you’re switching to living on one income. Maybe you’re finally buckling down to get after your life goals by saving money like crazy and actively managing your debt, perhaps paying off that student loan or credit card. Whatever your “why,” a huge roadblock for undergoing a money makeover (and keeping it going) is often getting used to sticking to a budget.
In my world, I simply call this a monthly spending cap and don’t subscribe to traditional categorized monthly budgets. (Read how I do my budget without categories here instead.) No matter what you call it or how you implement it, though, cutting the budget down to control lifestyle creep and intentionally limit your spending is a key piece of taking control of your finances.
But cutting the budget doesn’t have to be all about slicing and dicing your favorite things out of financial reach. Instead, learn here how to completely re-approach your spending and start fresh.
Pin it for later! ⬇️
What's In This Post
The Whole Spending Cleanse
If you feel your spending is way out of control, you have no idea where your money goes, or you’ve absorbed so much lifestyle creep that you just don’t know where to begin, a total reboot may be the simplest, most effective way to start fresh with a new budget.
Are you familiar with the Whole 30 diet challenge? This entire program is based on eating completely clean, whole foods (and cutting everything else) for just 30 days. After that, you introduce food types back into your diet one at a time, so you can separately evaluate how that food type affects you. Then you see how you feel, how your health conditions or other physical challenges (like sleep) improve or worsen, and so on with each reintroduction.
I think this template of a total cleanse down to your basic dietary needs parallels well to relearning to control spending money. Take it all down to bare necessities, temporarily. And then carefully, intentionally evaluate reintroduction of previously consumed things. It’s like a totally fresh start to your spending habits.
For a more dramatic visual, this is the “burning it all down” approach to your spending. Followed by rebuilding.
This may sound similar to a no spend challenge. The no spend month, or spending fast, is a commonplace challenge people use to help get spending under control. But to build new spending habits for the long haul, what happens after the no spend challenge- an intentional rebuilding process- is even more important.
Follow these rules to take a whole spending cleanse for an effective means of cutting the budget for your family. Do this for 4 weeks, or as long as you really need to get down to a good baseline for complete reevaluation.
Rule 1. Remove all automatic spending
For a temporary period, cancel anything that automatically charges you or is otherwise recurring. This includes memberships, subscriptions & recurring services that aren’t your critical basics (i.e., you can keep your phone service… scroll down to the end for how to approach this). Remember, this is temporary. You will live!
Worst case scenario, you drop the gym membership and wind up paying a re-enrollment fee. But hanging onto bunches of services or membership just to “hang onto the deal” prevents you from saving far more money in the long run by letting go of what isn’t serving you best right now.
In other words, better to pay a few re-enrollment fees on a small number of memberships/services you decide are truly worth it, than to continue paying for anything you’ve ever joined forever for fear of missing the bargain. It’s like the KonMari decluttering philosophy. If you hang onto 100 things for fear over the 1 thing you’ll end up regretting after a decluttering spree, you’ll live with 99 other things you don’t want or need. Better to lose the one, say whoops, regret it, and either miss it and move on (or replace it), than to live in a state of constant clutter.
Cleanse the automatic, recurring spending and start fresh choosing what is best for your ideal lifestyle now and in the future. Don’t stay tied to choices from the past costing you money today.
Rule 2. Recalibrate wants vs. needs
Perspective
We’ve heard to separate our wants from our needs to control spending. But that spectrum is reeeeeeally subjective! We live in a modern age of capitalism, a global economy, and very intelligent marketing systems (seriously, Google, you read my mind!). But Maslow’s hierarchy of human need contains things like air, food, water, shelter, sleep, inclusion, and love. Not robotic vacuums, quartz countertops, or never wearing the same outfit twice.
However, the third and fourth level of the hierarchy pertains to social inclusion and ego, respectively, which are still considered “deficiency” needs. Meaning, if you don’t have them, you feel anxiety or distress about it. The spending problem comes when material “stuff,” for which we trade our hard earned money, is being used to meet these needs.
Instead, we might acknowledge what we have, be grateful, and move on to the higher levels of self development and creativity (top of Maslow’s pyramid). Basically, stop consuming to fulfill your needs and start giving. Human needs are legit, but our usual ways of meeting them (or the way marketing makes us feel we should meet them) often are not. Maybe if we focused more on creating, producing, supporting, and giving of ourselves, these quick and easy “stuff” fixes would lose their appeal? Ok, philosophy tangent over.
Basically, if you’re reading this on a smartphone on WiFi, your level of need is on a whole other level than many people in the world. There are families who live in a single room house with a dirt floor. Children who walk miles alone in dangerous places for the opportunity to go to school. This perspective helps make cutting the budget feel like much less of a big deal. We can’t pretend we need a new kitchen and our kids need the latest backpack or game system. We may want these things, and even buy them, which is fine. But we’ve got to remember what basic needs really are, and that there are others who do not have a fraction of what we enjoy.
How to keep the want vs. need perspective
An easy trick to keep your wits about you with spending money on only stuff that really matters for your life, is to separate the want from the actual purchase by time. You found something at Target that’s perfect for {fill in the blank}? Leave it on the shelf and you can come back in 48 hours to buy it if you’re still committed to wanting that thing. If it’s worth the trip in a couple days, it probably was really important to you. If not, if probably wasn’t. Same thing with your Amazon cart. Never check out right away. Do your shopping, come back in two days, and reassess.
Use the “take a pause” trick throughout your 4-6 weeks spending cleanse to get some fresh perspective. Or continue it indefinitely.
Rule 3: Address needs without buying
If during your whole spending cleanse, you do come across some need besides the usual groceries and gas to get to work, evaluate your options. Is there a way to meet the need without consuming/spending? This is all about the three R’s for frugal living. See if you can reuse something you already have to fulfill this need. If not, look to borrow something that will work, or buy second hand. These habits are good for the Earth, your basement storage capacity, and good for your spending.
Rule 4: Table premium preferences & conveniences
A lot of us have some preferences and ideals in our spending choices that come at a premiums. For example, I prefer to buy cage free eggs for 3-4 times the cost of typical eggs. We all feel the pressure to make socially responsible purchasing choices- buy local, buy organic, shop small, even buy instead of borrow books to support authors.
I’m all about spending in a way that supports your values. But during a whole spending cleanse aimed at drastically cutting expenses, you may want to table your ideals temporarily. Simply do the less expensive option. Learn to use the library. Go with the regular basic grocery choices.
Same idea for conveniences. Skip the drive through and takeout meals. Eat basic, eat at home. Just plan to live very simply to give yourself space from all your usual ways of spending money.
In doing this, you will get more in touch with which choices are the most important to you and whether you can (and want to) fit them into your new budget.
Rule 5: Zero “shopping”
Commit to absolutely no shopping… and learn the difference between buying and shopping. Buying means procuring a specific item you have identified you need (or want) and intend to purchase. I’m out of vacuum bags, I’m picking out the right type for my vacuum and purchasing them. Fine.
Shopping is browsing things either in a brick and mortar or online store, looking for ideas, inspiration, discovery. Then you may decide to buy. I’m out of vacuum bags, so I grab some at Target and swing through the home decor aisles while I’m there. I find a display of beautiful things in the same colors as our living room decor. Oooo, perfect! Nope, not perfect. Not for your spending reboot.
Deliberately procure specific needs only. Use a list when you go to the grocery store. Shop online where you can choose the specific items you need and carefully evaluate your cart before checkout. Learn to use the ‘target item, procure item, and get out’ approach. Not the ‘browse and fill the cart’ approach marketers would prefer you use.
Remember your “why” and keep your larger goals ahead of getting distracted by all the lovely shiny objects. Remember, this isn’t forever. But ultimately, controlling your finances by cutting the budget to something that fits your means feels a whole lot better than constantly consuming stuff you don’t care about a short time down the road. (And living forever in credit card debt because of it.)
Want more ideas and support?
Subscribe today & receive my best tips (plus free resources) for simpler, smarter money management in your inbox:
Post-Cleanse Reintroduction
After you’ve thoroughly whittled your routine spending down to life’s essentials, you can then thoughtfully reintroduce. What aligns with your highest priorities, values, and purpose? What supports you and your family best? Ask yourself, is this worth it? And in answering these question, always remember your “why” that started you down this budget cutting road in the first place.
With everything possible temporarily cut away, you can prioritize what you want to come back. Maybe you canceled monthly dog grooming, the kids’ STEM activity subscription box, and lawn service for the time being. After living a cycle or two without these things, you may either realize how important certain things are to support your values and life priorities, and welcome them back. Or perhaps you see, while nice and convenient, those services were easily replaced with minimal effort on your part of the part of another family member. (Your teenager learning dog grooming techniques on YouTube maybe? Sounds like a future side hustle…)
In effect, you will put yourself back in the driver’s seat and take an opt-in approach to your habitual spending and consumption, instead of piecemeal opt-out approach to cutting the budget bit by bit. Make these choices with confidence now that you’ve taken a meaningful step back and intentionally re-prioritized how you spend money. Remember, all this unspent money can now load into your savings account, the place that really fuels your dreams.
Bonus! Budget Cuts that Keep on Giving
The idea of a spending cleanse is really focused on your day to day spending behavior and habits. But then there’s still the usual bills (i.e. the “fixed” expenses). I like to think of reducing monthly expenses that are recurring separately, as it takes a different strategy. When you make adjustments to these expenses, you can make one choice that saves money, and that gift keeps on giving every month.
It is therefore easier (you only have to decide it once) and very powerful (the change in expenses sticks for the foreseeable future). So if cutting the budget for you is about more than just your spending habits, be sure to revisit your options for all your fixed expenses. Sometimes one major choice, like downsizing your home, can replace the need for a lot of other quality-of-life spending cuts.
- Look into budget plans for your utilities. Often companies can give you the same bill every month based on your annual average. It’s not necessarily less money, but it’s consistent.
- Reassess your vehicle choice. A monthly car payment is a massive drain on your finances.
- Consider cutting cable & opt for a couple choice streaming services instead
- Go with an MVNO cell phone provider and pay $12 like Mrs. Frugalwoods
- Get internet based phone service, like Ooma for about $5 per month (this is what we have)
- Use a local agency to regularly reshop your insurance, where you can easily get a bundle for your home insurance, car insurance, and liability together. They do the work, you keep getting lower rates for better insurance plans. (I did this recently and saved about $1,000 per year insuring two homes, two cars, and liability)
- Switch to higher deductibles on your insurance plans when you have your emergency fund in place
- Ditch the 4,000 (or even 2,000) square foot house to downsize your mortgage, as well as all your utility, furnishing, decorating, maintenance, and cleaning costs
Key Takeaways
A thorough cleanse of your spending habits coupled to a pointed attack on your fixed expenses will give you great strides towards meeting a smaller budget. It may also reveal a simpler, less cluttered (literally and figuratively) life. If you’re looking to drastically cut spending, just remember there’s always space to improve. Just hit reset, and then take it once choice at a time rebuilding your simpler, slimmer budget.
You Might Also Like: